Commentator

Does anyone think the Nerdfighters are notable enough for an entry? If you search ‘Nerdfighters’ on this site, you’ll be directed to a few ‘memes’ created by the fandom, and while I don’t think any of them are particularly notable, the fandom itself might be influential enough for an article.

For those who don’t know, the Nerdfighters are a fandom centered around brothers John and Hank Green, who make up the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel. They started a popular vlogging show called Brotherhood 2.0 a few years back, in which they restricted themselves to only communicate via videos shorter than 4 minutes in length, which could only be uploaded once per week at scheduled times. They gathered a fairly impressive following which eventually identified itself as the Nerdfighters.

The Nerdfighters tend to gravitate towards a few topics and agendas, including such things as modern teen literature (alongside classic literature), various other fanbases such as those for Doctor Who and Harry Potter, teen issues and the ways to deal with them, and numerous charity drives. They’ve also created a bunch of internal ‘memes’, if you can call them that. They have their own hand sign which identifies someone as a member of the fandom (arms crossed over while making the Vulcan salute), and they popularised the acronym DFTBA (Don’t Forget To Be Awesome. As a side note, one of my IRL friends had a book signed by Neil Gaiman recently, and it was signed with DFTBA).

The Vlogbrothers have been pretty damn influential themselves, with John Green being an author who’s reached #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers List, and Hank Green being the internet entrepreneur who created VidCon – a convention for online video makers which attracted 7000 people this year and sold out a month in advance. If you check its Wikipedia article, you’ll see that a lot of big names have attended in the past.

I don’t think they’re quite as big as some other internet fandoms, but they’re hardly insignificant. If you check the Nerdfighter site and look in the ‘members’ section, you’ll find that they have over 92,000 members. If anyone else thinks they’re notable enough for an entry, I’ll give it a shot, but I thought I’d ask here before jumping in to it.

Database Moderator & Anime Anthropologist

I’ve had a Nerdfighters/VlogBrothers entry in the works for a while now, actually, and was planning to post this weekend. I’ve decided to stick to an entry about the Vlogbrothers as people, rather than Nerdfighters as a subculture, adding Nerdfighters as a sort of fandom section. I’ve spent quite a while on drafting (Not a fan personally, but most of my friends are obsessed Nerdfighters, so I kind of don’t want them yelling in my ear if I make a mistake, so extra care was added), but I can add you as an editor when it’s up if you want.